ThankUNext

🚨 The hot take making the rounds: Karen Read is about to file a motion to sever her defense from Aidan “Turtleboy” Kearney in the massive new civil defamation lawsuit filed yesterday in Barnstable Superior Court. Anti-Kearney corners of the internet are convinced she’ll cut him loose—paint him as the loose cannon, the merch-hawking provocateur, and ride off as the more “reasonable” defendant. On paper it sounds tidy. In reality? It’s extremely unlikely to happen. And once you read the complaint, the reasons become crystal clear. This isn’t two people who happened to say similar things at the same time. The 50-page filing lays out a coordinated, multi-year conspiracy in meticulous detail. Read allegedly recruited Kearney, fed him non-public information through intermediaries and Signal, praised his posts in real time (“Amaze ball sauce!!!!!”), met with him and her lawyers to align strategy, and used him as her public megaphone precisely because she needed plausible deniability. The same blog drafts, leaked filings, 189+ phone calls (over 40 hours in 2023 alone), and real-time texts while her private investigator confronted witnesses are all woven through every allegation. Under Massachusetts law, when two defendants are accused of acting “in concert” through the same acts to achieve the same goal, courts almost never split them up. Severance requires proving a joint trial would cause specific, substantial prejudice that can’t be fixed with instructions or redactions. Here the evidence is inextricably linked—same texts, same meetings, same “Canton Coverup” series, same jury-pool strategy. Trying it twice would be a judicial nightmare: duplicate discovery, duplicate witnesses, double the cost and delay. Judges in high-profile cases hate that. Read’s own incentives cut against severance too. She has never truly disavowed Kearney. The complaint quotes her evolving public spin—first denying contact, later admitting frequent talks but downplaying the timeline—yet in the HBO docuseries she openly discussed building a direct relationship with him after using cutouts. Her criminal defense leaned on the very “McAlberts cover-up” narrative Kearney amplified daily. Filing to sever now would force her to argue, in open court, that the man who helped build the “Free Karen Read” movement she benefited from is too toxic to sit beside. That risks undermining the entire story she’s told for years. Add the money and momentum: both profited—Kearney through merchandise, CashApp, YouTube superchats; Read through the movement that kept her case alive. Their shared financial and reputational stake makes a clean break messy. Kearney’s defense will almost certainly be “truth as absolute defense,” doing the heavy factual lifting on the plaintiffs’ credibility while Read’s team focuses on the bigger narrative. Why give that up? Bottom line: the chatter predicting severance feels satisfying to those who dislike Kearney, but legally and strategically it doesn’t hold water. This case was built as a joint enterprise from day one. Expect Read and Kearney to remain side-by-side in Barnstable Superior Court—two very different personalities bound by one very detailed set of allegations that the plaintiffs say they orchestrated together. The real fight isn’t about who sits at which table. It’s about whether the evidence proves the conspiracy the complaint so painstakingly lays out. Buckle up. This one’s could be a long, loud ride.

Well this is a conundrum for the FKR/AntiTB community. To support or not to support, that is the question.